Parking ticket prices jump 57 percent

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If you’ve received a parking ticket lately you may have had a little bit of a shock when you saw the price.

The price of parking tickets has risen at least $15 since last school year.

Parking without a permit, which resulted in a $20 fine last year, now costs $35.

Students who parked in a faculty lot were fined $20 last year; this year they will be fined $50.

Handicap violations have jumped from $75 to $100.

The Transportation Advisory Committee made the decision to increase the fines for citations as an alternative to raising the price of this year’s parking pass.

This can come as a relief to students who are tired of yearly parking pass increases that have doubled the price of a pass in three years.

Leslie Kennedy, a third year Chase Law student, said, “It is a fair trade to increase the price of a parking ticket instead of increasing the price of the parking pass because you won’t have to worry about paying for a ticket if you have a parking pass.”

This is what the Department of Public Safety had in mind.

“We aren’t planning to use this a fund-raiser.

“We don’t even get the money. Our goal was to get better compliance,” Lt. Colonel C. Jeffrey Martin said.

Martin hopes the higher fines will reduce parking violations.

So far, that may not be the case. According to Martin, there have been about 2,400 citations issued this fall semester.

Last year DPS issued about 14,500 tickets, equaling about 1,600 a month.

With each ticket costing at least $35, those 2,400 tickets can add up to a lot of money, $84,000 to be exact. Where does this money go?

“All of it goes to the general fund,” Martin said.

The general fund is the collection of all the revenue Northern Kentucky University brings in, said Kenneth Ramey, vice president of administration and finance.

“Money made from parking tickets and passes go into the general fund then are recycled into the maintenance of parking lots and paying for debt services of parking garages,” Ramey said.

Parking garages are not funded by the state and must be paid for by the university.

NKU finances the garages on campus through parking passes and the now costlier parking tickets.